Anyone know how a way to run a personal site for around $50 USD or under a year that can be pointed to a custom domain? My wife does some rug making and wants a portfolio available to show off her art, but we would prefer not to pay $10-20/month for such a site.
If you're slightly technical that should be $1/year for hosting + $10 for domain name registration.
I don't know what the best way is now, but a few years ago I set up an s3 bucket that where I basically got charged nothing because the site was < 10mb, and I had that behind cloudflare's cdn which doesn't charge for bandwith. S3 lets you serve static files if the bucket name is the same as the domain name - so no webserver or anything needed.
I am pretty sure for a very small static site there's probably a handful of options that are basically free. One of gitpages, cloudflare pages, I think have free bandwith, not sure about vercel, or netlify.
The $50 is because I dont want to have to get a cheap vps and maintain everything. I want to be able to load up a custom theme in some CMS and give her the login credentials.
I use digital ocean, but their cost actualy rose a tad bit over the last year, and i have heard that hetzner has better pricing, though i have not yet used them. Again, just take a look at the above site, and can search for a low cost hosting provider. Others leverage github pages, etc...for free, but that seems antithetical to this greater topic of self-host your own. Good luck!
Buying an old refubished computer and running whatever web server on a small & efficient linux distro is not really cheap in the beginning (since you've got to spend a few $ to buy the computer that will be a small home server), but in the long term it's really cheap (I spent 50€ in 2017 for an old dell optiplex fx160 on ebay, and it's still running my websites today).
Check out fastmail.com ... Given an email account, hosting a new website is nearly as easy as uploading an entire directory (to file storage) in one operation, then assigning a url to it (under one of the 20-30 fastmail domains). I have not linked a custom domain to one of these, but they do IIRC support it.
I've had excellent results with pointing people to Google Sites. The editor and available features work really well for just a static site for someone non-technical. You can set it up on a free Google account and point a custom domain name to it [1] very easily.
